CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

structural similarity between the form of the constellation and the object to which it gives
voice, but rather a sinnlose Änhnlichkeit between the non-conceptual in the object and an
experiential content disclosed in the constellation, a similarity that has nothing to do with
representation but rather is exemplified, for instance, in an unconscious binding relation
between an emotionally charged encounter with an object and the gasp that follows,
where the gasp is literally animated by the encounter with the object.
The similarity between language and object in which the non-conceptual is
expressed comes to life only in the experience (geistige Erfahrung) that the reader has
(or, can have) when reading the material. This experience re-animates the object not by
giving a representation of it that is ‘like’ the object, but by disclosing an experience of the
historical core of objectivity in the object—the object’s origin in its particular socio-
historical experiential context as it survives in and affects the present. The distance
between this origin and what the object ‘says of itself’ (its conceptual components as well
as the history of the object’s interpretation) is not bridged but rather made obvious in the
experience of distance, loss, and suffering that the reader recreates in her intellectual
engagement with the text. Only through the reader’s direct engagement with the text and
her actually bringing to life the experiential content in the text is the experience of the
non-conceptual disclosed to her; in this sense the method of constellations has an
irreducible experiential component.
There are three important consequences that follow from the fact that the
constellation is built on the basis of, and with the goal of expressing, a content that is
irreducibly experiential—and both Benjamin and Adorno voice these consequences. The
first is that the building of a constellation requires a discriminatory and perspicuous eye,
416